Geostrategist Shkolnikov: "We are already living in the Great Depression"

The author of the book "A Geostrategic View of the Future of the World and Russia" visited Dmitry Puchkov, on his YouTube channel , and shared his thoughts on possible scenarios for the future.

“Of course, we cannot say exactly what will happen, but we are more or less capable of identifying some main directions, how everything can be, to designate those main attractors to which everything is shifting.

I would like to say, of course, that the number of options for the future is infinite. But if we look at which are the most probable - with a probability greater than 2%, 3% - then there are not so many of them.

For example, the world has a total of a dozen futures and no more. The rest will converge to them: a little later, a little less, somewhere more bloody, somewhere less. Somewhere, of course, maybe a meteorite will fly by, but this is such a "wonderful" scenario. But there are not so many basic things.

Ten years ago, if a person were told that the world would be global, he would have looked and said: “Come on!”. The story is over, Fukuyama wrote. What is the disintegration of the world, what are you talking about? It's gonna be all right! And now everyone is repenting. The world is falling.

When 20 years ago Mikhail Khazin wrote that the world of Pax Americana would disappear, he was told: yes, this is complete nonsense! They laughed at him. Yes, they laughed at everyone who said that.

When I said that in the United States everything is heading for a civil war, I was told that you are talking about nonsense, it cannot be. When he said that the dollar is, of course, good, but you have to buy gold, metal, and hide it - everyone had fun.

When I regularly went to buy gold coins from my salary, they asked me why? And I said: it is necessary, it will come in handy. Right now the gold has just jumped a little. But in reality it will fly away well again, and the world is going to hell. And, in general, this is what they said - "the world will be global", this disappears.

From the current state, in an amicable way, there are four options for the future. First option: globalism remains. But now it is at a level close to a miracle, it is almost impossible to keep it.

We tried to build the world solely on the economy. And they began to unite the culture, and religions, and traditions, and the social sphere, and the problems that arose at the same time gave such tension, turned out to be so powerful that any attempts to combine all this at the expense of economic synergy simply did not produce an effect.

The disadvantage of trying to compress this spring turned out to be such that any advantages disappeared. And the world began to disintegrate.

And now the question is: will it disintegrate into large regions or will it disintegrate into even smaller parts? On countries, cities, policies ... Is that where he will fly?

So far, it is more likely that we are breaking up into large regions. That is, in terms of living standards, we are flying somewhere on the level of the 70s of the XX century. And if we are not lucky, we will see the beginning of the XX century, and even the end of the XIX century.

And we already had a chance to go there: after the Boeing was "dropped" in 2014, if everything in Ukraine had gone towards war, we would have seen it. If Hillary Clinton had won in the USA in 2016, we had a great chance of flying there.

That is, it would be such a general catastrophe, a Trojan-type war - when there are neither winners nor losers, there is formally a winner, but according to the results - disgrace; here was the chance to get this situation.

Now there are fewer and fewer such options, and even Biden's victory, which is possible, ... it will no longer give us just such a strong catastrophe.

Here, imagine: there is a mountain river and Trump is trying to carefully change its course so that it does not flood here, it does not flood there, he does not try to ride a wave, he understands that the world is falling apart. And Biden will try to build the dam - "and everything will be as it was." It's like with the coronavirus, when they said: now it will pass and everything will be as it was. It won't!

We are already living in the Great Depression. Moreover, already with the whole world.

When they ask me to tell you something good about the options for the future, I say: guys, I have a bad, very bad and just bad future for you, which one to tell you?

And we ourselves are to blame for this. We've been doing nonsense, bullshit for 30 years. For 30 years we have swept all the problems under the carpet, we did not solve them, but accumulated.

And as a result, we got not just an economic crisis, but a situation when our economic, social, cultural, military, technological crises are all intertwined. And at the same time we say: now we will try to solve any one local crisis.

From the point of view of mathematics, this kind of "isolation" may be a normal solution, but from the point of view of life it is not.

The world situation has been taken to an extreme.

Those decades, the last years, within the framework of the world that we had, they are in fact, blissful, we will remember them with joy, like the golden ages. And now that's it, we're in the Great Depression".

You can watch the full interview with Andrey Shkolnikov here.